It's very tempting to curl up in the wingback chair in my office and take a nap or do some knitting (making good progress on Kavi's owlet sweater, and Sharmi and Ryan's Xmas present, which is going to be fabulous), but I think I will be virtuous and work instead. I'm also tempted to write -- I finished reverse outlining the second half of Rasathi, and have figured out that I need about seven more scenes, which I have all plotted out -- perhaps 4-8 hours of work to actually write them. And then I'll be done! (Dan and Shmuel sent in comments on the revised first half, and they love it, which is a tremendous relief -- I was starting to freak out again. Thank god for ardent reader / critiquers.)
I'm not finishing by the original end of summer deadline, nor the revised end of September deadline, but end of October is still pretty respectable for a book I started really writing in June. Of course, to be fair, I wrote pieces of it long before that. But that's the way books are, I think, or at least my books -- it takes me a few years of knocking ideas around in my head, but at some point, they gel, and then the writing itself goes relatively fast. I wrote the second half of Bodies in Motion in one academic year -- but the first half took several years. So it goes.
If this book actually gets picked up as a trilogy, it'll be interesting to see how long it takes me to write the whole thing. I have a good sense of what the second and third books are about -- starting and ending points, main character arc, significant themes. But almost no actual plot. Hmm...
Anyway, I'm sort of itching to write, but I also have a monstrous stack of grading, plus a few important e-mails to write for the grant stuff at work. So I think here's the plan: a) write a couple grant e-mails, b) grade and prep for an hour, c) write for an hour. The children let me sleep eight hours last night (first night in a week, sigh), so I'm feeling unusually energetic. All that work actually sounds fun.
I love my job.
P.S. Forgot to note that when I am too brain-dead to work, I have managed to do some reading (which is also part of my work!). A spate of YA fantasy (as research for the book) -- China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver, Nnedi Okorafor's The Shadow Speaker, Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, and Anjali Banerjee's Maya Running. All solid reads, none blew me away. But enjoyable, and I expect I'll buy Maya Running for Kavi at some point, and will read the sequels to the Stiefvater and Westerfeld.
I just finished reading The Magicians & Mrs. Quent (not YA), which is an odd but enjoyable novel with magic in an Austen-type setting. (Like The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, but much grimmer.) It's kind of funny how the author strongly mimics literary styles -- the book opens very Austen-ish, then switches to Dickens, then goes super-Gothic (governess in haunted house on the moor, mad wife, brooding lord and all), and then comes back to Austen. It's actually quite well done, and holds together as a story, despite the slightly jarring genre shifts. I'm going to be reading the sequel, I'm sure.
That new book “Jane” by April Lindner is very good. It’s a retelling of Jane Eyre in the modern day, with Jane as a student and Rochester as a rock star.